Areas of Expertise

UC San Diego Health System Center for Transplantation leverages the expertise of physician-scientists and clinicians to provide leading edge, compassionate care for adults and children in need of organ transplantation.

Our transplantation specialists are organized into overlapping specialty programs based on their area of expertise and research interests. Read more about our areas of expertise below.

Established in 1968, the Center for Transplantation performed the first kidney transplant in San Diego County. Our expertise includes deceased donor kidney transplantation, living donor, and paired kidney transplantation.

UC San Diego Health System’s Liver Transplant Program is a UNOS/OPTN-approved living donor transplant center. We have extensive expertise in deceased donor, living donor, split and domino liver transplant procedures. Working in conjunction with the Liver Center, we carefully help you through the transplant process.

In 2011, surgeons at UC San Diego Health System's Heart Transplant Program performed the West Coast’s first implant of the world’s only FDA-approved total artificial heart. Started in 1989, the Heart Transplant Program exceeds national standards of excellence for heart transplantation for people with irreversible, life threatening heart disease.

An international leader in lung transplantation, the UC San Diego Heart-Lung Transplantation Program is the busiest lung transplant program on the west coast. The delicate heart-lung transplantation procedure is most frequently performed for severe pulmonary hypertension. UC San Diego Health System surgeons are proud to have some of the longest surviving heart-lung transplant patients in the world.

The lung transplantation program performs single lung and double lung transplantation with outstanding success. Lung transplantation at UC San Diego Health System gives people with end-stage lung disease a new chance at life.

A joint venture between UC San Diego Health System and Sharp HealthCare, the Blood and Marrow Transplant (BMT) program is one of 16 members of the prestigious Blood and Marrow Transplant Clinical Trials Network of the National Institutes of Health. Blood and bone marrow transplantation replaces defective or damaged cells in people whose normal blood cells have been crowded out by cancer cells.